Salute heroes of Flight 63

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

Updated 10:00 pm, Friday, December 28, 2001

After tests confirmed that there were functional explosives in the shoes of a man on the American Airlines flight from Paris a week ago, a Boston-based FBI agent declared, "We did avert a major disaster."

Hold the phone: "We"?

If a major disaster aboard that airplane was averted, and one surely was, it was averted not by the FBI but by remarkably courageous airline attendants and passengers.

The suspect, variously identified as Richard Reid, Tariq Raja and Abdel Rahim, tried at least twice to light what appeared to be a fuse attached to the explosives in his shoe. When two female flight attendants tried to stop him, one was shoved to the ground and the other bitten.

Several passengers joined in the fray against the 6-foot-4 inch, 200-plus-pound man. A collection of donated belts and two sedative injections from doctors onboard kept the man subdued for the next three hours. The Miami-bound flight was diverted to Boston and flew under the escort of two F-15 fighter jets.

Whether part of an organized terrorist attack or the isolated act of one man, the incident was eerily similar to what is believed to have happened aboard United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11, when passengers and crew on that doomed airliner managed to divert the plane from terrorists' intended target in Washington, D.C. The plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field. There were no survivors.

In that sometimes-distant world before Sept. 11, reactions might have been different. The man's strange behavior might not have been noticed right away. The passengers might have been reluctant to "get involved."

Given a less-alert cabin crew or passengers less willing to take action, there can be only dark speculation about the fate of Flight 63.

Terrorism's assault on civilization has produced yet another cadre of heroes. And this time they are alive to tell the tale. We salute these and other individuals willing to take action, to save lives at the risk of their own.